A weird and horrible week on television, the late-summer schedules dominated by a couple of new series so belligerently populist they might have been dreamed up in the offices of the Daily Mail (and, true to form, just hours before one of them was broadcast, the Mail splashed on it).

On Channel 4, we had Benefits Britain 1949 (12 August, 9pm), in which three current social-security claimants were required to travel back in time and “adjust”. Dear God. It goes without saying that this is a revolting idea for a documentary series and I don’t intend here to spell out the various intricacies of its stupidity and nastiness (naturally, this was the Mail’s favourite). But it was also miserably predictable, giving us two “decent” claimants (Craig, who uses a wheelchair, and Melvyn, a widowed pensioner) and one who seemed not so “decent” (Karen, a rude, shouty creature who is on incapacity benefit).

Meanwhile, on BBC1, there scuttled along an even more gruesome prospect in the form of Fightback Britain (12 August, 8.30pm), a series about how “you, the public” are “taking a stand against the bad guys”. What do you mean, you’re not taking a stand? Haven’t we all from time to time felt moved to instal a night-vision camera in our garden, in order to catch a local knicker thief as he jumps over the fence in search of laundry-fresh undies?

The knicker thief was the “funny” item at the end of a half-hour show that was otherwise dominated by stories of plucky derringdo (two lorry drivers who managed to stop a third from driving drunkenly the wrong way down a motorway) and advice about how to make your mobile phone thief-proof (in essence, get a tracking app on it). By the time it came on, I was bored to sobs – Fightback Britain’s presenters, Julia Bradbury and Adrian Simpson, have all the charisma of a couple of estate agents hell-bent on selling a particularly damp one-bedroom flat – so I can’t recall where exactly this incident happened. Suffice to say, the local police were not inclined to put a crack team of detectives on the case.

“Bring your washing in at night,” they told the victim, Leanne – which seemed fair enough to me, especially as by this point she was having to borrow knickers from her neighbours. Leanne, however, was having none of it. It’s just so convenient, putting out your washing last thing before you go to bed. Why would a girl want to do anything else?

When the film ended – thanks to CCTV, the thief was duly nabbed by Leanne’s husband, the waistband of his jeans apparently bulging with the very finest that BHS had to offer – Bradbury said earnestly to camera: “Remember, you can only film on your own property.” As if viewers everywhere were about to train CCTV on their neighbours’ rotary washing lines! And then it got worse. Turning to Simpson, she then uttered, presumably in a desperate attempt at chemistry, these dread words: “And I don’t think you need to worry about anyone stealing your pants, lovely.”

Lovely? To his credit, Simpson didn’t respond in kind (“Yes, Jules, my pants are rather skanky, aren’t they? Though I do wonder how exactly you know that. Ha ha ha.”). But nor, alas, did he look as though he wanted to throw up (presenting gigs don’t grow on trees, you know). See? I told you it was gruesome.

To soothe myself after this onslaught of ghastliness, I dived into Dreaming the Impossible: Unbuilt Britain on BBC4, which was like following a Big Mac with an ice-cold fresh peach. Oh, the relief. Presented by an architectural historian called Olivia Horsfall Turner, who has a delicately old-fashioned manner – she reminds me of Lucy in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – these documentaries are about fantastical building projects that never quite got off the ground. The first film (12 August, 9pm) took in Joseph Paxton’s proposed Great Victorian Way in London, a huge glass arcade that would have followed roughly the same route as the Circle Line of the Underground, had it not been superseded by the more pressing need to build proper sewers; and Geoffrey Jellicoe’s “Motopia”, a 1,000-acre Sixties new town in which glass corridors would have separated cars from people.

It’s all amazingly interesting: the drawings and the dreams, the zeal and the bathos. How wonderful to find that Paxton’s chief inspiration in life seems to have been a particularly exotic kind of water lily and that the greenhouse he designed for the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth was so vast and hot that it was known as the “Great Stove”. But the series speaks to the times, too. In our overcrowded cities, the problems these projects were intended to tackle continue unabated, while in the eyes of the architects who would solve them, the gleam is every bit as unnerving now as it must have been then.

It sounded like the densest of abridgements: five days of excerpts from Reality Is Not What It Seems: the Journey to Quantum Gravity by the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli (week beginning 28 November, 9.45am). Swarms of quantum events where time does not exist. Cosmology, meteorology and cathedrals of atomism. Leucippus of Miletus and lines of force filling space. Very few of us listening could have understood what was being said. Instead, we just allowed it to wash over, reminding us that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.

Perhaps once or twice, as the week progressed, token attempts were made to check that everybody was keeping up (“So, the number of nanoseconds in a second is the same as the number of seconds in 30 years”) – or to encourage listeners to picture themselves as part of an experiment (“Imagine I’m on Mars, and you were here . . .”). But generally it was utterly airtight, the reader, Mark Meadows, doing a good job of keeping his voice at a pace and tone uncondescendingly brisk, flattering us that nobody was scratching their head (“The speed of light determined by Maxwell’s equations is velocity with respect to what?”).

It was my favourite radio book reading of 2016. Not because I learned a single thing I could repeat, or might realistically mull over, but because it sounded like a brief return to something that has declined so much over our lifetimes – knowledge as part of a function of a media flow.

It’s that old idea that something might be there for your betterment. When we were exposed to just four channels on television especially, and forced to stay on them, we got into astronomy and opera and all sorts of stuff, almost against our will. (Rigoletto? Jesus. Well, there’s nothing else on . . .) The programme was marvellously and unapologetically impenetrable, as the days and chapters piled up relentlessly (“We are immersed in a gigantic flexible snail shell”). What this adaptation comprehended was that we don’t actually want someone explaining Einstein to us. What is much more compelling – more accurate and clever – is simply to show what it’s like in other people’s brains.

Antonia Quirke is an author and journalist. She is a presenter on The Film Programme and Pick of the Week (Radio 4) and Film 2015 and The One Show (BBC 1). She writes a column on radio for the New Statesman.